


Sarah Smiles

by TheoMiller



Series: Not A Rom Com [6]
Category: Fantastic Four (2015)
Genre: 5 Times, Arguing, Bad First Impressions, Bullying, F/M, Finals Week, First Kiss, First Meetings, Mathematics, Mild Sexual Content, Poor Social Skills, Pre-Canon, Science
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-04
Updated: 2016-01-03
Packaged: 2018-05-11 14:49:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,974
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5630476
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheoMiller/pseuds/TheoMiller
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"...I've saved your ungrateful hide twice in as many days," [Sue] hisses.</p><p>I was fine just a guy living on my own,<br/>Waiting for the sky to fall<br/>Then you called and changed it all, doll</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sarah Smiles

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kyaku](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kyaku/gifts).



> This one goes out to the mayor, for bringing my love for P!atD and this beautiful trash ship together, and for giving me some solid headcanons for the Server Fire Incident.

1.

Sue is scarcely sixteen and trying to do her cryptography homework in the library. _Trying_ being the operative word, because there are some idiots having an argument and she can hear them over the music in her earbuds, which means they're being far too loud for the library.

Sue is all too familiar with the particular group of idiots – they were smart, like everyone at Baxter, but they weren't game-changers or innovators, they were just neurologically typical A-types with parents with the kind of financial stability to have set them up for success. And the ringleader's surname was plastered on a wing of Baxter's partner teaching hospital, so they were sufficiently connected to not be intimidated by the fact that her father was Dean, which meant they gave her about as much respect as they gave anyone else – little to none.

She tugs an earbud out, prepared to tell them to finish their debate about diffy-q's or integrals or whatever it is the insufferable pack of engineering students were squabbling about this time, and realizes within second that this is not a mere intellectual debate about the answer to the challenge problem of the week. It's a testosterone fueled grudge match.

Normally, she'd ignore this, she has _homework_ , but there appears to be a particular victim, and that's not acceptable. She stands up, flips open her phone, thumbs over to the video camera, and holds it up. "Hey," she calls.

Luke and his cronies turn.

"That's a wrap," she says, and her voice doesn't shake even though she feels like she's about to be sick, "great work, guys, that's exactly the sort of footage we need, there's even a clear shot of all your faces."

The aforementioned faces all drain of blood.

"I'm thinking front page of the website, for recruitment purposes, but I'll need to get release forms from all of your parents. Mind giving me their info? Don't worry, Luke, I know your folks."

"Yeah," Luke blusters, "they're all over your donation paperwork. So why don't you just delete that video?"

"Wonder how much they'd pay to keep their son from getting an assault charge filed against him by the school," says Sue.

"You can't blackmail me. It's illegal too, and even if your daddy runs the school, my parents' lawyers can bury you."

"They'd have to acknowledge that there's video footage of you committing a crime to press charges against me for using it to blackmail you," she retorts.

Luke's right hand man, Joren, grabs his arm. "Dude, if she shows anyone that, I'm screwed."

"Yeah," says Sue. "So leave him alone, or I'll make your lives very difficult."

"All this trouble for him," scoffs Luke.

Sue glances at the boy and then back up at Luke. "I'd do it for anyone," she says. "The Baxter Institute motto, the one you signed your name to when you enrolled, what did it say?"

They were silent.

"What did it say?"

"Inventio pro bono omnium," they all mumble.

"Discovery for the good of all," says Sue. "You are here to advance mankind for the sake of the betterment of mankind. That in no way includes beating your fellow students. If I find you violating that principle again, you will be expelled. Regardless of who your parents are."

They glance at each other, and then Joren mutters, "C'mon," and they slink away.

"You shouldn't make empty threats," says the boy. "You only had your phone on for a second before you got their attention. You have no footage of the fight."

"Nope," Sue says, "just video of them acknowledging that they assaulted you. You could thank me, you know," she adds, as she holds out a hand and pulls him to his feet.

"For what? Making them more likely to attack me in secret?"

"For saving you," says Sue.

"I don't need saving," snarls the boy. He's probably a little older than her, much taller but skinny, dangerously skinny.

"Accepting help isn't a weakness," Sue tells him. "My father says it's a virtue that allows for the cooperation of moving parts that create a greater whole."

"Your father is a fool."

"My father has three PhD's and runs this school."

Something flickers across his face. But he brushes off his jeans roughly and says, "Don't do that again," and leaves.

Sue pointedly doesn't tell him he left his book behind.

-

2.

She starts to feel bad a day later and opens it in the hopes that he's actually filled out the book tag with his dorm's name so she can return it to his RA. Of course he hasn't, just scrawled his name in it with sharpie, Victor von Doom.

Unfortunately, there's also an assignment sheet for a project worth thirty per cent of his Math 273 grade, and from what she can tell, the project is complete, it's just. Tucked into the book along with the assignment sheet, which clearly says it's due today.

She checks the letter head on the assignment sheet; if it's Professor Geheren they're in luck, he'll give Victor the benefit of the doubt, but if it's Professor Stephens, Victor might as well resign himself to never getting above a 70 in a math class whose following course requires a 85 or better.

  1. STEPHENS, E211.



Shit.

Sue sprints across campus, clutching the textbook, and comes skidding to a halt outside the correct classroom only twenty minutes after start of class.

Unfortunately, she can already see Stephens staring down her class, focusing in on those poor souls who hadn't turned anything in. She throws the door open before she can think it through. "Professor Stephens," she pants out, "I - he - Victor von Doom, uh, he - " don't say forgot, don't say forgot - "he was in the library with me yesterday and I accidentally swept up his math book along with mine."

"Even if he didn't have his book yesterday, there's no excuse for at least starting the assignment before the day before it's due," says Professor Stephens.

"Yes, there is," Sue says. Wow, she really needs to stop doing things before thinking, because Stephens looks fairly homicidal. "Psychologically speaking, high performing perfectionists procrastinate projects due to anxieties. Should it be done today? Yes, absolutely, unless there are extreme mitigating circumstances, but scolding a student in front of their entire peer group isn't going to alleviate their anxieties, just exacerbate them and make them less likely to put in the effort."

"Miss Storm," says Stephens, "Save the speeches for mock trial. Victor is my student, and I'm not going to give him special treatment on your behalf. He didn't complete his work."

She holds the book out, chin tilted up. "He did. Or, at least, he came close, I think the final answer is still a step or two away. It was left inside his textbook. You said yourself he can't expect to complete it in one day. How was he supposed to complete it when he had to start from scratch without a textbook?"

Professor Stephens' scowl is matched only by Victor's. But Sue's heart is still thumping wildly, and the adrenaline combines with logic. "Actually," she says, more quietly, so only Stephens can hear, "it's against the school's policy to publicly discuss the grades of any student, including whether or not a particular student turned an assignment in." She turns to go, only to find Victor savagely packing his things away.

"You got my work," he tells Stephens, "I'm allowed to miss three classes, I'm leaving, count it as an absence if you want."

Sue barely makes it a few meters down the hall before Victor is there. "I told you I don't need saving," he snarls.

"And yet here I am, saving you. In fact, I've saved your ungrateful hide twice in as many days," she hisses. "I'd say your ego is too overinflated for you to graciously accept the help you obviously need, but not that you don't need it. And for the record, your little pet project, whatever it is, your math is wrong. It's not an exponential function, it's either a quadratic or a cubic."

"That's ridiculous, the real world application of the numbers precludes the possibility of negative x values."

"Assuming the dimension you're mapping operates solely in the first quadrant is ridiculous."

"Are you stealing my work?" He demands. "Stalking me, reading my notes?"

"If I were plagiarizing you, I would hardly tell you, I would just steal your load of gibberish, actually follow it to its logical conclusion like you apparently can't, and publish it as my own. I'm telling you what you're doing wrong so you can fix it."

"You couldn't understand my work if you had an entire textbook written by me designed to explain it fifth graders."

"Says the one willing to assume the Einstein Podolsky Rosen principle operates only in real integers. You couldn't graph your way out of a Trig II class."

"At least I'm not a self-righteous old money snoop!"

"Old money? Old money? You're wearing antique gold and blood opal jewelry, and judging by the simplicity of the crest on the signet ring, I'd say your family has had money for at least twelve centuries."

"And what about your family?" He snarls back.

"My family is _dead_."

He's staring now, but Sue is uninterested in continuing the conversation. Her blood feels like it's negatively charged, and for the first time she understands why people sometimes punch walls when they're angry. She leaves before she can decide punching Victor is an even better form of catharsis.

-

3.

She's woken up at a truly ridiculous hour several weeks later. Victor von Doom is standing there, and he looks like he's near-death – dark bags under his eyes, which are red-rimmed and bloodshot; dry, cracked looking lips; disheveled, shaggy hair falling in curls around his face, which is covered by more than a little stubble; jeans that aren't skinny like his usual fare. It's finals week, so none of that's actually not a surprise. The fact that he's clutching his math textbook like a lifeline is almost to be expected, except he says, "You were right."

"Huh?" she says.

"You were right," he repeats. "I need you to—" but instead of saying what, precisely, he needs, he shoulders past her into her dorm room and throws a rolled up piece of giant paper onto her bed. He spreads it out, weighing down a corner with his math textbook and grabbing a copy of Newton's Principia off of her nightstand to weigh down the opposite one.

Sue closes the door behind him without even thinking about it. "Is this— _oh_." She can't help it, she's drawn to the numbers like a moth to flame, and she's already picking up patterns. "Your Hamiltonian—"

"I know," he says, angrily, tugging at the roots of his hair.

She frowns. "The matrices are in perfect order, I don't see any…"

It's actually incredibly refreshing. Even when he stops agreeing with her and starts snarling back that his calculations are _perfectly accurate, look_ , they don't actually argue, because they don't finish sentences, or thoughts, they're on exactly the same page and it's just a volley of ideas back and forth until she finally grabs a highlighter and starts circling the erroneous number and the errors it's caused spiraling across the page.

"You're welcome," she says.

He scowls back at her. "For scribbling all over my work?"

"For saving you."

Victor immediately leans over the paper, disbelief turning into shock and then into something a little more broken. "How are you—" says Victor, breaking himself off. "I've spent my entire life on this," he says.

Even though she's starting to remember why she has a bit of a grudge against this guy, the idea of him spending literal years of his fairly short life so far working on this only for her to sweep in and start poking holes in things is a little heartbreaking. She rests a hand on his arm, because his shoulder is really high up and she refuses to do that to herself, she'll end up feeling like an eight year old. "I don't understand a lot of this," she tells him. "I see patterns, not—I would never be able to do any of this. I have a working knowledge of nearly every field of science, but only because I've got carefully memorized formulae. Application isn't my strong suit – not in mathematics, anyway. Materials science, actually, is my specialty. But this? It's just pattern recognition."

"Don't patronize me," he says.

"Don't romanticize me," retorts Sue. "I'm a genius. But I'm not omniscient."

He blinks slowly at her. "Of course not," he says.

"You're crashing," says Sue. She can't help but roll her eyes at him, because he's gone from angry and bristling to half-asleep in seconds. She's done it herself, and seen it in her father even more often. The work is done, and now he's finally letting himself relax from the adrenaline enough for sleeplessness to catch up. "Idiot. Where even is your dorm?"

Victor waves her off. "I'm the next building over, I _can_ walk without your help." There's actually five buildings in the immediate vicinity, and he looks likely to pass out in a stairwell. He pauses by the door, leaning on the frame and clearly trying to pretend he's not. "You could wrap the world around your finger if you kept up the pretense of omniscience," he says.

"The less people expect of me, the less I inevitably disappoint them."

She doesn't know where it comes from. He frowns. Then, "My family is dead too," he says, so quietly and sharply that she almost can't understand him. The words and the tone are jarringly disparate, and before she can process it, he leaves with his hands in the pockets of his leather jacket.

Sue's RA is staring at her from the doorway of her room.

"Math tutoring," says Sue.

She realizes far, far too late that she's wearing a pair of novelty boxer shorts and an oversized plaid shirt in place of pajamas.

-

4.

Sue taps out the rhythm of the song playing in her earbuds as she looks over the photocopies in front of her. Right now she's focusing on the My Name Is Cipher.

She's not entertaining any ideas that she'll be able to solve it, but she finds cryptography soothing. Even when she's half-certain this is nothing more than an embarrassingly transparent scheme to send the authorities on a wild goose chase, wasting money and resources on what could be gibberish or a grocery list.

She usually studies in the library, since she's technically not supposed to use the greenhouse as her own personal corner of campus – it encourages other students to misuse the area for less innocent things than studying cryptographs from cold cases. But since it is an easily recognizable thing, and she's doing her best not to appear too strange in front of the other students, she keeps her little hobby private. Plus, Luke likes to loiter there.

And if it also allows her to get away from other people for a while, well. That's just a happy coincidence.

Engrossed in overlaying possible segmentations of the document, she doesn't notice that she isn't alone until the shadow falls across her lap.

Sue startles.

Victor von Doom is standing there, a stack of notebooks under his arm and a faint crease forming in his brow, like he can't figure out why she'd be studying in the greenhouse, even though he's clearly planning on doing the same thing. She's done a little bit of poking around, figuring out where she'd vaguely recognized the name from before. He's a scholarship student, one her father had handpicked between the fall and spring semesters. She hadn't realized he'd stayed for the summer – most students went home, to work summer jobs or just to get a break – but now that she sees him, she's not surprised; he's got no family.

"Oh," she says, pulling her earbuds out. "Hey."

He nods, and then hesitates and gestures at the bench she's sitting on. "This is the only seat in here."

"Of course," says Sue, and grabs her bag. She goes to stand, to leave him to it, but he catches her sleeve.

"If you're just going to be looking at unsolvable cyphers, you might as well stay."

"Need me to save you again?" she teases.

When he doesn't respond, she sets the rules of politeness aside to analyze his body language with a precise eye. It's not finals week anymore, and he's no longer being beaten or scolded in front of an entire class – but his shoulders are still hunched, knuckles still white where he's gripping his books, the apparently perpetual bags under bloodshot eyes and the haircut he'd finally gotten only accentuating the fact that his cheeks are gaunt. He's falling apart at the seams. Some of the people, ones who come here for grants, working only on certain projects—well. Not everyone succeeds, and not everyone who doesn't handles failure well. Especially when they've grown up being labelled as prodigies.

"It's not unusual, you know," she says. "The fact that you find me so helpful. A majority of programmers find explaining their code aloud helps them to find errors in it. Personally, I find that a combination of audio and visual input allows me to see patterns more easily."

Victor narrows his eyes.

"Have you figured out the mechanism by which the matter from the unknown non-terrestrial location is transported here yet?" prompts Sue.

He smiles. It's small, crooked and a little twisted, like it kind of wants to be a sneer, and she arches her eyebrows expectantly.

She smiles back when he straddles the bench, facing her, and throws open a notebook to a page covered with annotations around a hand drawn diagram of the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen effect.

-

5.

Sue's only half-listening to Victor. It's not like she's required for this part of things; she's a rubber duck, really, just listening helps him more than anything else. Instead she's thinking about kissing him. She does this a lot, enough that she's starting to find herself running through it in her head during tests, and has to go back to the question she last remembers completing to make sure she picked the right answers while on autopilot.

He's very distracting. She keeps catching him staring at her, and when she tries to meet his eyes he pretends to be busy with work.

Evidently, he's not going to do anything.

This is terrifying, the single most terrifying thing she's ever done, which is dumb, because she's kissed people before, this isn't a big deal. But it _is_ a big deal.

"—this damned relay in the code—" Victor continues.

She stops him dead in the middle of the stairwell. She's got calculations of her own: average traffic rate, how long until classes start ending, they're between stories, not in view in either of the doors, so she'll have time to step away in case a door opens.

"Sue?" says Victor.

Sue keeps her hand on his elbow while she climbs up a step higher than him, which brings them as close to even in height as she can manage. If she's read this wrong, this could cause a ridiculous number of problems. But she doesn't think she has.

She leans forward, making it absolutely clear what she intends. Their eyes meet, and Sue moves her hand to rest against his neck, tilting his face closer.

Victor's pupils are too wide for the florescent glow of the lights in the stairwell. "Sue," he says again, "what are you doing?"

Sue smiles.

"Saving you," she says, and closes the distance.

The kiss is soft, and Victor returns it, hesitant, with hands brushing against her waist like he's not sure what to do with them.

There's a sudden rush of noise as one of the lecture halls lets out, and Sue spins around and continues up the stairs, Victor at her side, like nothing happened as the other students pour into the stairwell.

-

6.

Sue can't look at Victor right now, or her father. If she hadn't stopped him - Sue takes a deep breath and smoothes her hands over her skirt. She hates this. Hates the coldly professional blazer and skirt and the crisp white shirt and the ridiculous, sensible black Mary Jane heels. It feels like a funeral. Here lies everything you ever wanted, now throw it all on the pyre or cover it with dirt.

But it could be a trial instead of an official inquisition from the school board - still could be, in fact. Harvey is fuming. He could tolerate Victor when he was useful, even pretend to care about him, but now that he's a nuisance, he's showing his colors. Victor was a tool to build him a weapon.

Sue's carefully neutral gaze doesn't go unnoticed. Harvey looks up, meets her eyes. Sue can't stop her eyes from narrowing as she stares back at him. He snaps his gum.

She lifts her chin and smiles in response. His jaw stops working.

"Not only is there enough evidence to have you expelled, but the school board will be—"

"Excuse me," says Sue, her voice sweet and innocent. "What evidence?"

Her father doesn't smile, but his eyebrows twitch just the teensiest bit when he schools his expression.

"Miss Storm," the superintendent says, "if you'd been paying attention—"

"If I'd been paying attention, I'd know that there's a bit of circumstantial evidence that's frankly rather ridiculous. There's no video. No eye witness reports. No fingerprints. Nothing but motive and the fact that his access card was used."

"He has no alibi."

"He has an alibi," she says. "Victor was with me."

"Miss Storm," says Victor, harshly. Warning.

She ignores him. "Victor and I have fairly regularly spent the night together for months now. It's hardly a secret. My RA could attest to the fact that he came back to my dorm with me last night, as he does many nights. He was there last night. And he was there this morning."

"You're lying," says Harvey.

Sue smiles. "You have no proof, Superintendent Rinehart. Not enough for the DA to prosecute and waste taxpayer money."

"She's LYING," Harvey says loudly. "She's trying to save her friend."

She doesn't fold her arms, but it's a near thing, and her tone sharpens. "Really? Fine. Let me go get the sheets off my bed, and the condoms from my trash, and see if the DNA evidence is lying." Oh, god, she's never going to be able to look her father in the eye again, this is incredibly humiliating. But she presses it further. "Victor was with _me_ last night."

"So his alibi for this crime is that he was sleeping with an underage girl?" says Harvey, too loudly.

Sue turns to look at Harvey now, and the man is red with anger. It's a good thing he quit smoking, or he'd keel over with a stroke from sheer apoplectic rage right about now. She smiles. "The age of consent in 17 in New York."

" _Susan_ ," says Victor.

She still doesn't look at him, just looking at Harvey across the room.

"He didn't want to damage my reputation by admitting it," she says, the lie easier than she'd anticipated. "Victor risked prison for the sake of my reputation. Don't drag him through a public trial out of spite, Dr. Allen. He's done working for you."

She doesn't say, _if you press this, so am I_. It's understood.

Harvey sits, and Sue lets her gaze wander to Victor. He's white knuckled with anger, but he can't hide the relief. Not from her.

Sue knows he's never going to forgive her for saving him. She still doesn't regret it.

**Author's Note:**

> There'll be another chapter (possibly two more chapters???) and if you're feeling Sad about the way this ended please see "How You Get the Girl" to remind yourself that they'll fix their sinking trash ship.


End file.
